The world’s capital cities are things of beauty, and no stranger to flurries of tourists. But summertime in these cities is a hotbed (literally) of tourist activity, with travellers voyaging from far and wide to soak up the urban atmosphere alongside blossoming flowerbeds and the heat of the sun. Accordingly, summer is high season for Airbnb bookings – offering the opportunity for Airbnb hosts to maximise occupancy and income at the same time. As with any industry, a peak in demand allows savvy homeowners to increase occupancies and prices without fear of losing bookings. But a word to the wise, informed by our unique Airbnb management experience: occupancy should not be your sole metrics this summer, or during any busy season.

Through our vast experience of managing Airbnb listings for busy hosts, we’ve learned that high occupancy isn’t the best measure of success when listing your home. Sure, having lots of booking enquiries for several months in advance of summer is great, but it can also be telling of a mispriced home. If you’re a 5* host with rave reviews, beautiful listing pictures and a spectacular listing description, it could well be that your Airbnb listing is attracting paying guests for all the right reasons. But in most cases, we’ve found that it’s actually reflective of a listing priced at much lower than the optimum nightly rate for the neighbourhood.

So, how can you tell? And what can you do about it? As a multinational Airbnb management company, it’s our business to know the business – we have access to reams of data on competing listings in your area, their pricing strategies and availability, as well as our own pricing expertise (we price homes for our hosts as often as we drink tea). On top of that, we’ve also built our own algorithm tool (fancy!) to help us keep on top of seasonal trends and output dynamic pricing strategies, with a dedicated revenue management team whose only job is to maximise yields for our hosts. This added value is why our hosts love using our services, and is a perfect way to ensure your home is always listed at a competitive yet appealing price. Sound too good to be true? Well, our numbers also speak for themselves: we manage to maintain an 80-85% occupancy rate for the available days that our host share with us rate over the across the year, and across our portfolio, while still boosting our hosts’ income.

If the penny has dropped and you’re concerned you’ve underpriced your homes, we’ve got bad news and good news. The bad news is, cancelling your current summer bookings to adjust your price upwards will result in penalties from Airbnb, and a drop in your search ranking for future potential guests. But the good news is that there’s still time to use our wealth of knowledge to increase your own wealth across the coming summer months, should you still have availability. It’s also important to think longer term, too: summer is not the only peak you need to prepare for – Christmas is another popular time for tourists coming to the city, and there’s plenty of time to enlist our expertise before the festive bookings flood in. If you’d like more information, or want to enlist us to manage your listing, you can contact us here. Happy holidays!